Eternal Core (School of Swords and Serpents Book 6)

by Gage Lee

  My mind wandered while I finished patching my body up. The smart thing to do was go back to the School and rest. What I wanted to do, though, was see Clem. It felt like ages since we’d been together. If there was any chance to fix things with her, I had to take it.

  I told myself it was because this was necessary for my quest. That Clem would help me make sense of Eric’s cryptic message. Maybe that was even true.

  Or maybe not.

  “This is dumb,” I told myself.

  And then summoned a portal.

  The Alarm

  FINDING CLEM IN THE Grand Design was easy, even with pain radiating from every inch of my body. The instant I concentrated on her while meditating, the deep connection we’d shared since the Five Dragons Challenge leaped into my mind. The segment of the great mortal pattern that defined her location was a magnet that unerringly attracted the iron filings of my thoughts.

  In the moment before I activated the Gate of the Design, the pressure of unfamiliar attention washed over me. Eric had been right; someone had felt the enormous power I’d unleashed and was taking a peek. That was okay. I’d be long gone before anyone could pinpoint my location.

  “Catch me if you can,” I murmured and forced myself back onto my feet.

  I closed my eyes in the Far Horizon. When I opened them again, I was standing in a narrow room with a single bed pushed up against one wall and a three-drawer dresser against its opposite. A small desk with a closed laptop on top of it and an uncomfortable-looking chair in front of it were the only other pieces of furniture in sight. An institutional pastel green paint coated the walls. The color was probably supposed to soothe the residents but made me think of the examination rooms the Inquisitors had kept me in on Atlantis.

  None of that mattered, though. I only had eyes for the bed’s sole occupant.

  Clem, her hair longer than I ever remembered seeing it, was curled up facing the door, the blankets pulled up to her chin. The slanting yellow light that poured in through the room’s only window illuminated the dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks. That brief glimpse of her face filled my heart with happiness. It was almost enough to make me forget my injuries.

  A smile quirked the corners of Clem’s lips, and I wondered what she was dreaming about.

  Or who.

  And then alarms howled and flashing red lights punched through the late-night stillness in a jarring burst of chaos.

  Clem’s eyes shot open, and her fusion blade appeared in her hand. She rolled out of bed and flung blankets in my direction. With her other hand, she summoned a twisting vortex of wind that sent the bedclothes whipping around my face, temporarily blinding me. It was a neat trick that I would have admired more if it were aimed at someone else.

  “Get out of my room!” she shouted and brandished her sword. The blade was different than I remembered, its tip a slender point, the cutting edge delicately curved. She held it steady, ready to punch a hole through me if I tried anything.

  “It’s me,” I said, raising my voice over the alarm. “Jace!”

  The miniature tornado that kept the blanket swirling around me faded, letting the bedclothes fall to the floor. The citrusy bite of Clem’s perfume hung in the air for a split second longer, dredging up memories of better, simpler times.

  “Is it really you?” Clem asked, her sword still pointed at my Adam’s apple. “You should have known better than to come here.”

  That wasn’t exactly the greeting I’d hoped for, though I wasn’t sure what I’d expected. In this fork of the Grand Design, Rachel thought she and I were together.

  “I was just with Eric,” I tried to explain.

  “How?” Clem shot back, the blade edging closer to my skin. “He’s still in the Federation training program. No guests allowed.”

  While Clem’s suspicion of me would make things more difficult, I was relieved to hear that Eric’s path was back on track. “It’s complicated,” I said. “Can I sit before I fall over?”

  Clem’s eyes shot to the flashing red lights in the ceiling, then back to me. She chewed on her lower lip for a second, then grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the bedroom. “You can’t stay here. You tripped an alarm, and security will be here in no time.”

  “Where are we?” I asked, wincing as I hobbled along to keep up with Clem.

  “Moscow,” Clem said, her lips pursed into a frown. “I signed up for an assignment in the Empyreal Law Library, remember?”

  Clem dragged me to a window in her living room, disengaged the lock at its top, and raised the sash.

  “Outside, on the fire escape.” When I didn’t immediately move, she gave me a little shove. “Go, Jace. They’ll be here any second, and I need a good excuse to explain the alarm.”

  “Okay,” I grumbled, and dragged myself out onto the fire escape. By the time I’d slipped outside she’d closed my window and rushed to the kitchen I could just see through the living room. She cranked up the gas burner on the stovetop, tossed a pan onto it, then glared at me and made a shooing motion.

  Oh, yeah.

  I climbed halfway up to the next floor and sat on the cold metal stairs. It was freezing outside, and I was very glad for my new core level. Even as a master, I was sure I would’ve frozen my tail off in a few minutes. The Moscow winter wind was a screeching, freezing monster hungry for warmth. Even at the venerable level, I huddled into myself to protect my face from the wind’s angry bite.

  The Peeping Tom prodded my aura again. Great, they were persistent. If they were powerful, company might already be on their way. I needed to get what I came for and vanish before my new fan pinpointed my location.

  A few seconds later, I saw Clem head past the fire escape window to open the front door, smoke drifting out past her from the kitchen. A man’s voice, too muffled by the closed window for me to make out any words, rumbled nearby. Clem’s unintelligible answer was barely audible over the wind’s howl. After a few more seconds, I saw shadows pass in front of the window.

  I should’ve gone higher up the fire escape. If a security guard opened the window and looked outside, they’d see me crouched above them, looking like a cut-rate cat burglar. If I moved, they’d hear my steps rattling on the rickety stairs. I held my breath, willing the guards to lose interest and go home. There was more discussion inside, Clem’s voice sounding nervous, maybe worried. Someone coughed, and a shadow moved to the window to open it and let the smoky apartment air outside.

  Don’t look up, I thought.

  I weighed my options. Even wounded as I was, the guards wouldn’t stand much of a chance in a stand-up fight against me. My serpents and other tricks would make quick work of anyone below the disciple level, and I didn’t sense any power greater than that in Clem’s apartment.

  A brawl with security guards would solve precisely nothing, though. Clem and I still wouldn’t have time to talk, and she’d have an awful lot of questions to answer when the dust settled. That wasn’t fair to her, and it wasn’t fair to the security guys just trying to earn a paycheck.

  The Gate of the Design technique could spirit me away if I was discovered, but my core and channels ached so badly I didn’t want to push myself too hard. The Flame had fixed me up after the business at the Umbral Forge, but that didn’t mean overexerting myself couldn’t kick off another exciting case of core delamination.

  With no better option, I stayed put and waited.

  Finally, after what felt like several tense hours, I heard another brief conversation from inside the apartment. It was easier to hear with the window open, but I couldn’t understand Russian. From the sounds of things, they could be wishing my friend a good night or telling her they’d be back soon with a strike team to take the place apart.

  Finally, Clem, wearing a heavy parka and furred boots, stepped out onto the fire escape. She joined me on the steps and shivered in the cold.

  “We could go inside,” I suggested.

  “Not until I know why you’re here,” Clem said. “I haven’
t seen you in almost a year, Jace. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, honestly. And then you show up in my bedroom beaten half to death—”

  “Eric did that!” I said.

  “—with this outrageous story that you saw Eric when we both know that’s impossible. So. Tell me what you want so I can kick you back to the curb.”

  Clem’s words were like a splash of cold water to my face. Broken shards of a painful memory forced their way to the surface of my thoughts. Clem and me fighting, tears streaming down her face, a door slamming. My heart breaking.

  That was all I got, but it was more than enough. It hurt.

  For me, none of that had happened. I still loved Clem. I couldn’t imagine what had been so dire it would drive us to go our separate ways.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said, “and I don’t have much time to explain it. There’s a good chance someone’s on their way here to rap my knuckles.”

  “Who?” Clem asked.

  “If I had to guess,” I said, letting out a deep sigh, “my clan elder.”

  “Typical,” Clem said. “Well, if you want my help, you better start talking. Because you’re not getting anything until I know why you’re here.”

  “It’s cold,” I said. “Let’s just go inside and talk like civilized humans.”

  Clem was already shaking her head before the sentence was halfway out of my mouth. “I started a fire in my kitchen to explain the alarm. Everything will smell like smoke for days. You owe me an explanation. And you don’t get back into my apartment, or my life, until I get it.”

  That stung more than I thought it would. Clem had been the most important person in my life for years. She’d stood by me when both Abi and Eric thought I’d lost my mind. Hearing those words out of her mouth scorched my heart to ash. A pang of guilt pricked my conscience, too, because Clem deserved to know the truth.

  “Okay,” I breathed, trying to ignore the third pass across my aura. “Here’s what I know.”

  Clem didn’t interrupt as I spelled out the whole disastrous chain of events that had led me, battered and bloodied, to her bedroom. I spared no detail, telling her everything from the moment I’d woken up looking down on the new students, to Rachel’s visit to Tycho’s laboratory, to the mirror me who’d put me on this quest, all the way through to my battle with Eric that had ended mere minutes ago.

  Her eyes got wider with every new revelation, and she hunkered down deeper into her coat to hide from something other than the freezing wind. When I finished, Clem had folded up inside her parka and hid her face in its hood. Her shoulders shook, and I sat numbly next to her, unsure how to ease her pain as she sobbed.

  Only, they weren’t sobs, and Clem wasn’t sad.

  “Oh, man,” she laughed, “you had me going there for a minute. Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  I was surprised to find that her laughter stung more than the tears I’d imagined.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” I insisted, “every word. This is the last leg of the quest for the Empyrean Flame, Clem. I need to find Ultima Thule and put an end to this mess. And I need to fix the spells the sages put on Eric, Abi, and you.”

  Clem pressed the tips of her fingertips to her lips. She shook her head for a moment, and her eyes went wide.

  “You’re serious?” she asked.

  “Of course I’m serious!” I nearly shouted.

  “Keep it down,” she hissed. “I have neighbors.”

  We said nothing for a few moments after that. Clem watched me, her eyes clear and steady. To my surprise, she reached out and tangled her fingers in mine. She squeezed my hand and laid her head on my shoulder.

  “This is why it never worked,” she murmured. “Between us, I mean. I can’t see the world the way you do, everything all snarled up in vast conspiracies that never end. You see threats everywhere, Jace. It got to the point where I couldn’t tell whether everyone really was out to get you, or you just enjoyed picking fights.”

  I wanted to pull Clem into a hug and hold her until she understood everything I’d been through. But what good would it do? She’d been living in a different world than I had for the past year and a half, and it would take me more than a few minutes to convince my smartest friend that none of that was real.

  Because, for her, it had been.

  My head swam, and I leaned against Clem. I wanted to stay just like that forever. When we weren’t talking, I could pretend that things were good, that everything would be all right in the morning. We deserved that, didn’t we? After all my friends and I had been through, we’d earned a few slices of peace and happiness.

  Attention weighed down on me, and I wished a vile curse on whoever thought they had a right to know what I was up to. If it was my clan elder, she and I would have some very harsh words. For now, though, I needed to finish this, and, one way or another, leave Clem in peace.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know how this looks, me showing up and asking for help. If there was any other way...”

  Clem sighed. “If I help you with this, whatever it is you need,” she asked, “will it fix things? If what you said is true, then your quest will push us back to the Design as it was intended. And then we can just be normal people. Just Clem and Jace. Will that happen if I help you with this?”

  I took a deep breath and looked at Clem’s core. Fixing things required undoing the spell that the sages had put on her. I wasn’t sure how complicated it would be, or how dangerous. On the plus side, Clem didn’t seem driven to annihilate me. Maybe there was a more peaceful solution to unraveling the sorcery Tycho and his goons had wrapped around her core.

  Except there wasn’t any spell.

  Her thread was frayed and thin, but it wasn’t split. With a shock, I realized that the sages hadn’t messed with Clem. The differences between our memories weren’t caused by jinsei sorcery.

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “But I can’t promise that. There’s a chance, sure, but... you know how it is. There are never any guarantees.”

  Clem nodded and hung onto my hand even tighter. When she looked at me, a pair of tears wormed their way down her cheeks. “That’s what I was afraid of,” she said, then took in a deep, shaking breath. “I’ll help you. One last time.”

  We went inside and Clem shucked off her coat while I closed the window and locked it. She stabbed a finger at the couch in the small living room, then disappeared into the bedroom. When she emerged, there was a laptop tucked under her arm.

  “What was the name of that place you think the dragons are?” she asked. “Ultimate fool?”

  “Ultima Thule,” I said, correcting her. “I thought it was a place, but Eric told me it wasn’t a place, it was a punishment.”

  Clem chewed on the inside of her lip for a second, then opened her laptop and tapped on the keys. I was surprised she didn’t have a quantic computer and mentioned it.

  “What are you—” she started, then shook her head. “Let’s just finish this.”

  I waited impatiently while my friend’s fingers flew over the keyboard. She moved with blazing speed and ultimate precision, and I saw she’d rubbed off the letters on most of the key caps.

  “Why d’you want this assignment?” I asked her. “I thought you were through with the law.”

  Clem looked at me with wide eyes. “I grew up, I guess. This is what my family does.”

  I nodded, but her words crushed me. She’d never wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps, and the last I remembered she was on the verge of breaking away from the family legal business. Had our fight pushed her back into it?

  Maybe that’s why the sages hadn’t needed to ensorcel Clem. I’d done it for them.

  “Who did you say this punishment was for?” Clem asked.

  “The Five Dragons,” I said. “It was something that happened way back near the time of the Compact.”

  “The Empyrean Court records don’t go back that far, but...” Clem paused. “Here we go. There’s no mention of Ultima Thule, bu
t here’s a list of ancient draconic punishments.”

  She motioned for me to come closer to see what she’d pointed at on the screen. “This is from the secure research area; there’s a lot of old stuff they keep locked up so people won’t know the naughty business our ancestors got up to. You can see the dragons liked their punishments flashy and permanent. Drawing and quartering was popular—you can come closer, I won’t bite.”

  My stomach tied itself in knots as I leaned in closer to look at the laptop’s display. It was impossible to focus on the list of horrifying punishments while the smell of Clem’s hair, clean and fresh with just a hint of vanilla, was stuck in my nose. It brought back too many memories, mostly good. My heart ached for a chance for Clem and me to find some simpler time, where—

  A sizzling pop ripped through the quiet, slamming the door on thoughts of better places and quieter times. A blast of warm air washed through the room, and I felt the arrival of someone powerful. Whoever had been tracking me had decided to make an appearance.

  “Who are you, and what are you doing in my apartment?” Clem shouted.

  She unleashed a whirlwind that picked up everything that wasn’t nailed down, including the sheets on the floor of her bedroom. The material wrapped around the intruder, concealing them from us while blinding them.

  Smart lady, I thought.

  Whoever had come searching for me hadn’t even caught a glimpse of the living room before my friend had blinded them. Clem would deny I’d ever been here, I hoped, and no one would be the wiser.

  My friend grabbed her laptop, shoved it into my hands, and mouthed one word.

  “Go!”

  I activated the Gate of the Design.

  And I went.

  The Deal

  MY RETURN TRIP TO THE School of Swords and Serpents was a clumsy disaster. The Gate of the Design took a lot out of me, and I’d used it three times in less than two hours. That made my control over the spot where I arrived sloppy and inaccurate. I returned to my apartment not in the middle of the common area, but right where the dining table sat.